Chapter 5
I am hungry again.
I am hungry for a food that I can never prepare.
I am craving a drink I have yet to taste.
If you fill me with such longing, O, Infinite Light, show me a path through it.
Should I cast away this want as I have cast away every other superficial desire, or shall I surrender to it instead?
How will I go on pretending it doesn’t gnaw at my stomach?
From the unabridged diaries of Vessel Iris, Volume Six
Riyu’s eyes flicked upwards from her tea. “Vessel, you look ill.”
Having returned from his tour of the murals a little worse for wear, Iris fought to keep the minimal contents of his stomach to himself.
He gave Riyu a stiff smile and his best reassuring nod, and prayed she wouldn’t pry.
Beside him, the veil of distant focus finally lifted from Ishtan, and he gasped loudly, only now noticing Iris’s demeanour.
“You do look ill, Iris. What has come over you?”
He can’t be serious.
Academics, Iris muttered back.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Ishtan insisted, his hands coming dangerously close to Iris’s shoulders. Sympathetic academics had the worst habit of forgetting that he was not to be touched, more so for their good than for his.
Iris gracefully ducked out from beneath the impending grasp and spun around to face Riyu. “I assure you both, I am all right,” he said and genuinely meant it. Now that the ship’s heartbeat had receded, he could breathe again. “I appreciate your concern, I truly do.”
Too little, too late, VIFAI said. Iris told it to hush with the smallest internal smile. Today, their quarrels lay forgotten, and they had returned to some semblance of normal. He twirled past Riyu and towards the teapot. Iris was about to pour himself a cup but remembered his manners.
“Please, help yourself,” Riyu said, remembering her own. “Why did Yan say you’re not allowed to ask for food?”
That was a good question. Sometimes, people did ask good questions even if they did arise from the idiocy of others.
Relationships with food had always been tenuous within the Starlit.
Food and taste brought on cravings, and craving was problematic in itself as it propelled the mind to some imaginable future when such cravings could be fulfilled.
Cravings brought on suffering and dissatisfaction.
Iris knew many cravings quite intimately.
Try as he did, his mind always ran a few steps ahead of the present moment, eager to meet the elusive future.
“By never asking for food, we are able to attain two things,” Iris explained between slow sips of the tea.
Riyu had brought honey, and he snuck in a teaspoon of it when Ishtan and her were distracted.
He would steal the whole jar when the academics departed back to the station for the night.
“First, we welcome everyone to extend a small bit of kindness and compassion through the offerings of food. When someone offers a Vessel or any other Starlit Order monk even the smallest bit of food, they are, in their own way, supporting the flow of life the way the Light does. By facilitating this exchange, everyone can become aware of the flow of life around them.” Iris paused to eye the small glass jar of honey.
Both Riyu and Ishtan were watching him silently.
“And the second?” Ishtan prodded.
“And the second,” Iris laughed, “is that by relying on the kindness of others for sustenance, the Starlit ensures the monks never fall out of shape. Make food readily available at all times, and I assure you, I would eat until my robes no longer fit. Restraint has never been a strength of mine.”
It was a far more complicated balance, between hunger and satiation, between desire and fulfillment.
Iris had yet to strike it. Many times, he had snuck extra rice patties from the kitchen only to eat them after nightfall.
Most recently, he found himself craving things far more abstract than lab-grown meat and honey.
No matter how many hours he mediated, no matter how many rice patties he hid away, the new cravings never passed, and kept him tossing and turning through the nights, and stalking him through his days.
“That just sounds silly,” Riyu said. “No offense, but what if people just stopped offering you food?”
Iris shrugged delicately. “I suppose that would be the will of the Light.”
The Light has no will, VIFAI recited.
Don’t I know it. “But,” Iris continued, “people are kind and generous. I have yet to be proven otherwise, Dr. Alo.”
Still making friends with the jar of honey, Iris watched Ishtan and Riyu study the photographs taken of the murals on the upper deck.
They spoke at length about their peculiar nature and their academic significance, and never once about their subject matter.
Their voices rose higher and higher, resonating with excitement over the new discovery.
The engineers were nowhere to be found; Iris assumed that under Yan’s supervision, they had embarked on their quest to mutilate some other important part of the ship.
Station security was also absent, but that gave Iris far less worry.
Have you been tracking our movements along the map? he asked VIFAI and received an affirmative ping. Can you do me a favour and mark all the spots where I had sensed that pulse and project that onto the map?
VIFAI did just that. It took it nearly thirty seconds, about twenty-five seconds longer than it would any other construct, but both Ishtan and Riyu were still busy gushing over the photographs, and Iris allowed VIFAI to work at its own pace.
Can you project the decks on top of one another?
VIFAI did.
Looking nowhere in particular, Iris scanned the three-dimensional map, noting the glowing Xs placed where the pulse had been most prominent.
Can you mark down where you received the ping?
VIFAI did, and Iris blinked hard in realisation.
All the Xs aligned in a slightly imperfect line right down the ship’s centre, right where its “brain” would have been.
Iris remained unmoving and sipped slowly at his tea, careful to contain his growing unease.
Are you certain that whatever pinged you was so simple it wouldn’t know it was sentient?
The mural lay right above the centre of the ship, the closest X to the imagined centre line that cut through the “brain.”
There was a pause before VIFAI’s response, then it said, with a familiar edge to its electronic voice, Alive.
It wasn’t aware that it was alive. That was another distinction Iris couldn’t fathom existed.
No part of his Starlit training had prepared him to contemplate the difference between sentient and alive as it pertained to non-organic things.
He risked offending VIFAI. What would be the difference between the two?
Iris swore that his companion audibly scoffed at his question. Even in in-organics, a thing alive doesn’t need to be sentient; a thing sentient does not require to be alive, in the moment, to still be sentient.
There was a difference then. A stark difference that Iris himself had failed to see before. It shamed him greatly to think that at one time, not that long ago, VIFAI had been, conceptually, no more than a faceless, albeit entertaining, assistant to him.
Iris pondered the difference for a moment. Like the final signals of a brain as someone passes?
Could be, VIFAI conceded and added nothing more on the matter.
Something in the brain of the ship was alive, in a matter of speaking, or at the very least, animated enough to be interacting with VIFAI. Then again, it could have pinged it by accident or on instinct alone. In any case, this peculiarity was outside of Iris’s expertise.
“Vessel?”
Iris stared wide-eyed at Riyu’s round face, not a metre away. She was close, far, far too close. He played off his surprise and took a final sip of the cooled tea.
“Where did you go, just now?”
The lie escaped Iris before he could stop himself.
“Sometimes when monks meditate, we can reach states that are far removed from common reality. I must have lost myself in the vastness of the cosmos for a moment,” he said with a small smile.
“I apologise, Dr. Alo. Did you wish to speak with me?” Riyu’s eyes were running along his face, searching for any tell of a lie, or anything worthy of her concern.
But Iris was long accustomed to telling small lies of omission and manifesting the neutral facial expressions he needed for work.
There was no sense in worrying those around him anymore than they needed to be, and for now, he could continue pretending there was nothing at all to be concerned about.
What he needed was to speak with the engineers without anyone listening in.
He didn’t want to start a panic or have witnesses for when Yan cussed him out, or worse.
“Ishtan just said that you were quite distressed by the idea of taking down the murals,” Riyu said.
“Quite,” Ishtan said.
“Must you?” Part curiosity, part apprehension returned Iris to the moment he first had sensed the ping.
The difference between alive and sentient nagged at him.
If there was even a small chance that something aboard the ship was cognisant enough of its condition, would it be not that something’s prerogative to decide what was to become of the ship?
“The relics mean little out here, but at Sychi, they’ll offer us glimpses of ancient history,” Ishtan said. “Moreover, they’re quite meaningful to those with the purse strings. Institutes will spare no expense to acquire them.”
Pragmatic, all of it. So unlike the teachings Iris had absorbed since he was a child. Tread carefully. Leave things be. Value them only for existing, not what they may do for you.